The present invention relates to a material magazine for automatically feeding materials such as long steel bars to a metal working machine.
Advancement of computerized control systems has come to enable the metal working machines (including sawing machines) to work automatically without an operator, for example, in cutting a material such as a long cylindrical steel bar into pieces as desired in size and number. The automatization of metal working machines is, as a matter of course, accompanied by a need for an apparatus to automatically feed materials to an objective metal working machine.
A typically conventional material magazine for a metal working machine such as a sawing machine consists of a horizontal roller-conveyor for transferring a material in the length direction toward a metal working machine and of a material loading bed equipped with material pushing flukes. The bed, which is directed to a flank of the conveyor, supplies a thereon placed material onto the horizontal roller-conveyor by pushing the material with the flukes in the lateral direction.
The automatization itself of such a material magazine may easily be attained by incorporating the operation sequence of the magazine purposefully into the sequence control program of a automatized metal working machine. However, the above-mentioned material magazine has a disadvantage that, if the material shows a warp, it is frequently transferred improperly owing to the warp of the material, so that the head of the material may not be inserted in the metal working machine. Such an irregular transfer is prone to take place especially in case of the material being a long bar. The above disadvantage remains a major obstruction in making the material magazine automatically operative.